Then she was walking again, laughing a bit, and everything was pressed out of her except a yearning for water and a clean shirt. Inexplicably, unaccountably happy, grinning even.

A day later, they reached the Southern Reach building. The swamp had crept up to the courtyard and seeped across the tiles, pushed up against the concrete steps leading inside. Storks and ibises had built nests on a roof that looked half caved in. The evidence of a fire that had burned itself out inside the building, somewhere near the science department, showed in scorch marks on the outer walls. From afar, they could see no signs of human life. No shadow of the people Grace had known there. Behind them lay the holding pond and the scrawny pine strung with lights, now two feet taller than when Ghost Bird had last seen it.

By mutual unspoken decision, they halted at the edge of the building. From there, a gash in the side showed them three floors of empty, debris-strewn rooms, and a greater darkness within. They stood for a moment, hidden by the trees, and peered at those remains.

Grace could not sense the way the building slowly took one breath and then another, the way it sighed. She could not sense the echo at the heart of the Southern Reach that told Ghost Bird that this place had built its own ecology, its own biosphere. To disturb that, to enter, would be a mistake. The time for expeditions was over.

They did not linger, look for survivors, or do any of the other usual or perhaps foolish things that they could have done.

But now came the crucible, now came the test.

“What if there is no world out there? Not as we know it? Or no way out to the world?” Grace saying this, while existing in that moment in a world that was so rich and full.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Ghost Bird said, and took Grace’s hand for a moment, squeezed it.

Something in Ghost Bird’s expression must have calmed her, for Grace smiled, said, “Yes, we will. We’ll know.” Between them, they might know more than any person still living on Earth.

It was just an ordinary day. Another ordinary summer day.

So they walked forward, throwing pebbles as they went, throwing pebbles to find the invisible outline of a border that might not exist anymore.

They walked for a long time, throwing pebbles at the air.

000X: THE DIRECTOR

You sit in the dark at your desk in the Southern Reach in the minutes before leaving for the twelfth expedition, your backpack beside you, the guns tucked into the outer mesh, safeties on, not loaded. You will leave it all a mess. The bookshelves have become overgrown, your notes nothing anyone would recognize as an organized pattern. So many things that make no sense, or only make sense to you. Like a plant and a battered cell phone. Like a photograph on the wall from when you knew Saul Evans.